The Crisis Managers

"I am sick!" cried Dr. William J. McGill, president of Columbia University. As he spoke, helmeted New York City policemen were wading into a crowd of some 500 student demonstrators, pushing, shoving and chasing them with their clubs. McGill had summoned the police only to disperse the demonstrators, but when the students started throwing rocks, eggs and bottles, about 35 patrolmen broke ranks and charged. Shaken at the sight, McGill ordered the charge halted. "Captain, get them out of here," he shouted. By the time the skirmish was over, there were 14 people injured and seven under arrest.

It was a small skirmish indeed when compared with the rioting that shook major U.S. universities during 1969 and 1970. And small compared with the prospect of a nationwide student strike that had been proposed by activists to protest the renewed U.S. bombing of North Viet Nam. But the repeated outbreaks of campus violence offered clear evidence that the student protest movement is not dead yet.

In the past two years, a number of universities have sought out new presidents with special abilities as "crisis managers"--notably McGill of Columbia, Derek Bok of Harvard, Richard Lyman of Stanford. As the disturbances began a fortnight ago, the crisis managers tried to control the students with a mixture of conciliation and firmness. The presidents of the eight Ivy League schools and M.I.T. issued a joint denunciation of the renewed bombing of North Viet Nam, but they also announced their determination to keep their institutions open.

For a time, the policy of toughness seemed briskly efficient. At the University of Maryland, Governor Marvin

Mandel sent in 800 National Guardsmen to rout 2,000 demonstrators who had fought off police and attempted to burn an ROTC armory. At Stanford, police plowed into a column of 1,000 marching students and arrested 207 of them. And at Kent State, campus policemen arrested 200 students who sprawled in a hallway to block entrance to the offices of the university's ROTC instructors. But on most campuses, the crisis managers had only relatively mild crises to manage. Both on Viet Nam and on other issues of race and politics, the students themselves lacked the fervor of past outbreaks.

Low Level. Governor Ronald Reagan has long avoided any California campus, for fear that his presence would set off a riot; but at the height of the current protests, he went to U.C.L.A. and defended President Nixon's war policy. He was greeted not with riots but with jeers. Most Harvard students disapproved when 150 demonstrators once again "trashed" the Center for International Affairs, then scarcely reacted when President Bok promised that the university would help prosecute the vandals. (Conversely, when 40 black students staged a sit-in and hunger strike in Bok's office, he simply moved to another office.) Almost everywhere, classes were only lightly boycotted, mass meetings and marches only lightly attended.

A kind of normality returned even to Columbia, which had the most serious demonstrations of any campus. While a hard core of 100 demonstrators occupied five buildings, most of Columbia's students and faculty went about their normal activities, though classes often had to be held on lawns, in apartments, fraternity houses and, in one case, a local bar and grill. President McGill decided not to call the police again, preferring "to ride this one out." He did not have long to wait; groups of students soon began intimidating demonstrators so that they left the buildings. They explained that much as they opposed the war, they were even more determined to go to school.

Why the low level of student action? Administrators, faculty members and students themselves think it results from seven years of fruitless demonstrations, which have left collegians emotionally exhausted--and wary of jeopardizing grades and degrees at a time when jobs are hard to find. Moreover, the American fighting in Viet Nam has decreased --on the ground--and the draft has receded as an issue. "My own opposition increased in direct proportion to how likely it was I would have to go over there," admits U.C.L.A. Graduate Student George Kooshian. One young Princeton professor dismissed the demonstrations as "passe and jejune." Indeed, many of the participants were freshmen and sophomores--not upperclassmen, who are veterans of the fierce protests which followed the killings of four students at Kent State just two years ago this Thursday.

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